Part 5

The literature of imagination has always been rich in autobiography, confessed and unconfessed. It is in its essence, perhaps one should say in its impulse, largely an affair of passionate reminiscence. Taken, therefore, as merely a recent writer of distinction who has chosen to deal avowedly with _Things Remembered_, Proust must challenge comparison with dozens of eminent men, his forerunners and contemporaries. Tolstoy has given us his own life-history, not only diffusively throughout his novels and pamphlets, but in that wonderful piece of reconstruction, _Childhood and Youth_. Among living men, James Joyce, with an epic gift and an heroic feat of memory, has recorded for us an impression of his past, physical, mental, spiritual, and has shown it interwoven with countless other lives. And these are two taken at random. _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_—Proust was not the first, nor will he be the last, to choose it as a theme.

Where Proust stands as yet alone is in his manner of approaching his theme. Or, with more exactitude it may be said, his manner, vigilantly passive, eagerly quiescent, of letting his theme encroach upon and claim him. All attempted recapture of the past is for him “futile,” a “labour in vain.” Not reconstruction, but understanding of things remembered, is his aim. And to this end with deliberation he permits himself what the realist rejects but the plain man all unknowingly cherishes—the glamour in which for every one of us our own past is bathed. Divest the past, Proust seems to say, of the present’s gift to it—the light that never was on sea or land—and you take away its essence; treat the present as independent of the past and you destroy its integrity. That this is true we, as human beings—acting, thinking, receiving impressions from moment to moment—must recognise when it is pointed out. Our actual existence is not so much a narrative as a web in which the shuttle of events flies back and forth between the warp and woof of past and present, from neither of which it can escape any more than can we ourselves. The trouble is that it is pointed out so seldom, and least of all perhaps by novelists, who in this matter still lag far behind our common human experience. The grasp with which Proust has laid hold upon the philosophic and aesthetic values of memory—as, for example, in the passage where he describes the eating, after an interval of many years, of a _petite madeleine_ soaked in tea—is a new thing in literature. Here is pre-eminently the novelist with a past. None before him has taken _Things Remembered_ not merely for theme but for medium as well.

To forget this, or even for one moment to minimise it, in speaking of Proust, is utterly to lose one’s bearings. But, accustomed as we are in our own hearts to his treatment of the past, we are so unaccustomed to it in literature that it is really not easy to avoid the artificial standpoint, the more that Proust proclaims his naturalism neither explicitly nor by freakishness of style. So quiet, so classical is his bearing that it hardly strikes one to investigate his premises.

And so, concerning his long book of memory, one hears questions put by intelligent and even admiring readers. There are his “shadowy” women—“Did women at any time mean anything to Proust?”: there is his disconcerting chronology—“How old is his hero supposed to be during such or such an incident?”: there is his social pose—“Was Proust not himself as bad a snob as any he describes?” But such questions can be asked only in forgetfulness, answered only in constant remembrance of the author’s unique attitude toward his main subject, the past.

It is because of this that, though setting out to make a few observations upon Proust’s women, I feel it no digression if I draw attention here to a particular passage which occurs early in the novel, towards the end of the _Combray_ section in Volume I.—a passage in which he not merely gives the circumstances of his hero’s first literary composition, but puts before us the composed fragment itself. A few pages back and the boy has been bemoaning that, his choice of a literary career notwithstanding, his mind is blank of subjects, his intellect, at the mere idea of writing, a void. Now, suddenly, while out driving, he is so deeply enthralled by the charm of three steeples which withdraw and advance, disappear and reappear, always in different relations to each other, according as the setting sun catches their angles and the carriage winds along the country road, that words leap to frame themselves in his head and, for all the jolting and inconvenience of the moment, he must immediately write them down to “appease his conscience and to satisfy his enthusiasm.”

The actual piece of prose so written is reproduced, says the narrator, “with only a slight revision here and there.” We may allow ourselves, I think, the presumption that it is substantially a true record.[2] Certainly it furnishes us with the key to the whole work. Passages from Proust more exquisite, even more characteristic, might easily be found; none so significant. Those ever-veering steeples, sometimes before, sometimes behind, lightening, darkening, changing, looking now like three golden pivots, now like three birds perched on the plain—they reveal, more fully and subtly than could any philosophic exposition, both the method and the philosophic preoccupation of the author. They declare that for him there was never an actual but always a psychological perspective, and that _peculiar to himself_. This is why there is no intellectual or logical means of checking Proust’s observations. Either we accept them as he gives them, emotionally, or we reject them as meaningless. He has, he repeatedly tells us, no faith in intellectual observation, neither will he presume upon logical deduction in questions of human feeling. He quietly discards that assumption of god-like knowledge for which we have come to look so confidently in our writers of fiction. He will have none of the sympathetic imagination that “puts itself in another’s place.” He refuses as an act of disingenuousness either to project himself into or to interpret the character of another. “We alone,” he says, “by our belief that they have an existence of their own, can give to certain of the things that we see a soul which they afterwards keep, which they develop in our minds.” Essentially, that is to say, he believes he can know nothing outside of his own sensations, and for him every sensation is inextricably interwoven with memory. Whether he writes of a woman or a musical theme, of a love affair or of trees in the park, he never forgets that in the very act of observing there are several elements to be reckoned with. The thing observed may seem to casual eyes fixed like the three steeples. But Proust knows better. He knows that he himself is moving, that within him his past is in a different kind of motion, dictating, suggesting, comparing, reminding, side-tracking, and that therefore the steeples themselves are never in reality still. Nothing in life is stable. Within the flux of our past and our present, figures outside ourselves seem to rise, to move, to act. But such movements have reality only in so far as they are reflected in the unique mirror of a soul. And for Proust this mirror is combined of the individual and his memory.

[Footnote 2: See, however, my foot-note on page 106 and _Pastiches et Mélanges_, pp. 91-99.—C.K.S.M.]

No wonder if such a novelist is sometimes called difficult. He is too like life to be easy. Other novels, beside his, seem accommodatingly static, other characters finished, understood in each spring of each action—precisely as those we know in life are never finished or understood.

But to come to the women.

A man of particular sincerity once said to me that after twenty years of married life he understood his wife no better than on the day he married her. He had of course become familiar with her modes of thought and action which served as knowledge for practical daily purposes. But familiarity had never bred understanding. Her underlying motives, the ultimate significance of her looks and words, remained hidden.

This, I think, is Proust’s position, more especially when the woman happens to affect him powerfully. In every case we can _see_ his women, and thus far they are the reverse of shadowy. Grandmother, mother, aunts, and servant—the women that surround his childhood; Mlle. Vinteuil and the Duchesse de Guermantes—female figures that shock or thrill his boyish imagination; Odette—the mature cocotte that stands throughout his youth for feminine mystery and glamour; Odette’s daughter Gilberte, and later Albertine—the young girls, minxes both, with whom he falls in love; Madame Verdurin and her circle—the social climbers who call forth his most delicate adult irony as well as his most rancid contempt;—these, simply as pictures, leap out at us complete. Nothing could be more objective than their presentation to the eye and ear of the reader. We feel with each one as if we had met her in the flesh—as one has met a casual acquaintance. The mother’s submissive wifeliness; the almost masculine incorruptibility of the grandmother; the raciness of the servant; the neurosis of Aunt Léonie; the half-hearted viciousness of the music-master’s daughter; the slightly comic social splendour of the Duchesse; the unmeaning melancholy of Odette’s eyes; the unredeemed vulgarity of Madame Verdurin; the domineering girlishness of Gilberte, by turns frank and secretive, appealing and repellent; the smile with which Albertine, at once innocent and wanton, receives the youth in her bedroom—in depicting these Proust never trespasses beyond natural as compared with literary experience. We all know with what liveliness in conversation any man with the gifts of observation and wit can create an image for us of some female “character” met with in his childhood or his travels. But let that same man come to speak out of his emotions of some woman who has moved him deeply, then his heart will cloud his brain, his tongue will falter or run away with him, and he will no longer be capable of outlining a portrait. As listeners our impressions of his subject will be gained, not from what he says, but independently from what we perceive that he feels, which may well be in direct conflict with his words. In life, that is to say, the more important a character is to us the more we are thrown back for our ultimate knowledge on the emotions aroused by that character in ourselves. In fiction it is usually the other way about. It is his central figures whom the novelist pretends to know best. Proust, however, has recognised this discrepancy with scientific clearness. He devotes himself, therefore, where his important women are concerned—aside from the very minimum of detached, objective observations—to a presentment of the effect they have upon the men that love them.

So his women set us wondering and supposing and coming to our own conclusions exactly as we do in life, either when an individual of our own sex is described for us by one of the other sex, or when we are emotionally affected by some one of the other sex.

For this is important. When it comes to his male characters, Proust takes a different tone. Here he finds himself able, quite consistently with his philosophy, for far more positive assertion. In various ways he can allow them to reveal and expound themselves, and even each other, as when Bergotte speaks of the married Swann as a man who “has to swallow a hundred serpents every day.” The point of view, the intellectual outfit which all males have in common—these give the male novelist a certain tract of solid ground when dealing with characters of his own sex. A man’s fellow-feeling for other men is very strong. It has but a faint and imperfect parallel as between woman and woman. Proust, accordingly, without any sacrifice of conscience, can, “by his belief,” endow Swann with a soul. But—marvellous and highly characteristic creation as he is—Swann may be put in the same category with other male characters by other male novelists. Odette, Gilberte, Albertine, are in a category by themselves. Outside of Proust’s book they are only to be met with in life.

It is in this differential treatment of his women that we perceive how rigorously Proust applies his artistic method. He never seeks to transcend his own personality. In him, the observer, the whole of creation lives and moves and has its being. Men are creatures made in his own image. He can faithfully follow his own emotions, and “by his belief” can conscientiously endow his men with souls. But women are in a different case. He has no inner guide to assure him that they are anything more than the phantoms they seem. Strictly speaking, this should imply no more than a negative attitude. In fact, however, Proust goes further. Because he has no grounds for belief he passes into unbelief. In his philosophy _esse est percipi_, therefore, the souls of women for him have no existence. Herein it is likely that he has borne out the unavowed experience of most men. Whether or no, he certainly has expressed the truth of his own experience with a purity that few, even among great writers, can rival.

One thing more. There is Proust’s mother.

No doubt the avenging eagerness with which I reintroduce her here for my conclusion is due in part to my being myself of the soulless sex. But quite apart from any such feelings, to speak of this novelist’s women without reckoning especially with his mother would be inexcusable. That he adored her in childhood he makes manifest. Further, that throughout his life this adoration effectively debarred him from profound emotion where other women were concerned becomes clear enough to the reader. It hardly appears, however, that Proust was himself wholly conscious of this. True, there is a passage in the _Combray_ section in which he speaks of “that untroubled peace which no mistress, in later years, has ever been able to give me, since one has doubts of them at the moment when one believes in them, and never can possess their hearts as I used to receive, in her kiss, the heart of my mother, complete, without scruple or reservation, unburdened by any liability save to myself.” But this is the only place where he seems to allow that the love he bore his mother was even comparable in kind with the love aroused by other women later in his life. Indeed, though he repeatedly speaks of the anguish with which in his childhood he longed for his mother’s good-night kiss, the ecstasy with which he received it, as if it were the Host in an act of communion, conveying to him “her real presence and with it the power to sleep”; though he tells how, for that “frail and precious kiss,” he prepared himself in advance so as to “consecrate” the whole minute of contact; though he dreaded to prolong or repeat the kiss lest a look of displeasure should cross those beautiful features with the slight, beloved blemish under one of the eyes; yet he describes himself at this time as one “into whose life Love had not yet entered,” as one whose emotion, failing love and as yet awaiting it, happened to be at the disposal of “filial piety.” No wonder if, when temporary “loves” came, he compared with them as unconsciously as unfavourably this good and gracious mother—so admiringly timid as a wife, so gentle towards strangers, so perfect socially, so full of stern solicitude as a parent (“she never allowed herself to go to any length of tenderness with me”)—and found them merely exciting to the senses. He had already, so far as woman was concerned, given his heart away.

Yet, after all, perhaps he knew it well enough and merely takes his own way of saying it. He tells us little enough of his mother, though probably he tells as much as he knows. What her own real thoughts and feelings were we are left to guess. But “never again,” he says, after describing one very special visit of hers to the boy’s bedroom—“never again will such hours be possible for me. But of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs ... which broke out only when I found myself alone with Mamma. Actually their echo has never ceased.”

CATHERINE CARSWELL.

IX

_THE BEST RECORD_

One of my feelings whenever I read Marcel Proust is regret that Henry James is not alive to enjoy him, as he would have done immensely and amazedly, though, judging from the letters of that great master of the art of writing fiction, no doubt he would not have given him his unqualified approval. But he would have recognised him as working at his own level, while not in his own groove. Yet, for all that Proust is the author of practically only one book, big though that book is, in that one book he has spread his nets wider, and sunk them deeper, than did Henry James in the sum of all his novels. One wonders if such mastery has ever been obtained so suddenly and so completely; indeed, the sureness of touch seems a little less certain in the last published volumes than in the earlier ones. We had revealed to us from the beginning a new way of writing fiction, or rather of describing life. It had never so been done before. Let us pray that he will have no disciples—one can foresee the horror of them; but influence he must have.

My own interest begins with the second volume of _Swann_, though my admiration begins with the first sentence of the first; and my advice to new readers would be to take up any volume after _Swann_—to start in the middle—when I am sure they will insist on knowing everything the author has to say about his characters from the beginning. You become soaked in the lives of these people as a sponge becomes soaked with water. In the process you live your own life over again, and, if you have lived in Paris and in Normandy, you tread the same ground.

Proust has no “story” to tell. He sets down life as it was lived by certain people at a certain period: Parisian society from the middle of the Dreyfus case to the present day. From the amazing brilliance of the whole opening two details presently detach themselves—the love of Swann for Odette, and the boy and girl idyll in the Champs-Élysées: they are beyond words to praise, for they are not Art, but life recorded with matchless insight or remembrance. We need not compare, but how pale is _Jean Christophe_ beside these pages! So when we get to Normandy, the _Plage_, the hotel, and the countryside with its little railway, and childhood has melted into adolescence, we live again those days, and tread those paths, which we thought beyond recapture, save by indistinct memory. It is an exquisite pleasure which I, at any rate, never expected to experience.

Emerging from the shadows of the joyous band of _jeunes filles en fleurs_, with its hint of perversity—we shall have to rewrite our hymns: “There’s a _Freud_ for little children!”—we come to the marvellous Guermantes, with whom Proust has pictured that high-born snobbery—and life without snobbery is like meat without salt—which observers, as they get on in years, come to know is inherent in the upper classes no less, perhaps more, than in the middle classes: a right snobbery, bereft of any meanness or noxious prejudices. These people see France through their family history, and their family history was France. They are Ladies and Gentlemen, with all that that connotes: and in considering them we are conscious of all the rest who are not. Proust, in exploring one path, illuminates the others. We spend a few hours in their company, in the course of a dinner and an evening reception (taking up a couple of hundred or so of pages), and at the end we know all about them; we understand the world which made them, and what they are going to make of the world. As contrasts to these great ones we have those other snobs, the Verdurins, of the “cultured” middle class. Surely never before, in memoir, essay, or fiction, has it all been set down so brilliantly.

One wonders what sort of man Proust really was. We know he was a great friend of Léon Daudet—two men, one would have thought, as the poles asunder. We know that he slept by day, and lived and worked by night: we know that he was ill and neurasthenic. We know also that nothing was hidden from him, and that he had an infinite power of expression. He was a very human being with the brain and the pen of a recording angel.

Occasionally, lest his cleverness should seem to be superhuman, one comes on a jest or an anecdote which is a “chestnut”; or he becomes a little too intricate, or his neurasthenia shows its cloven hoof: once or twice I am inclined to throw the book down as too tiresome, but I cling to him and grapple with him, and soon feel again that I am enjoying one of the greatest pleasures of my life.

One meets with all kinds of people in his work, some of them very odd people; though how very odd is the ordinary normal person! Proust’s odd people may be thought to be modern: yet both in art and in life they are indeed very ancient. They are those for whom—to modernise an old phrase—Life is a _mauvais quart d’heure_ made up of exquisite complexes. Side by side with these “moderns” are the old-fashioned people, notably the Grandmother and Françoise—not Micawber is more definite than this last.

The more we study the great writers of all ages, and the more we observe for ourselves, the more we realise that the world never alters; we can only ring the changes on the same material. Harmony and discord, beauty and ugliness! It is like a gramophone disc. The records vary, the melodies, the arrangements, make their individual effect, but the substance is the same. The Masters make their records on an unchanging surface. Marcel Proust’s is a magnificent record; perhaps the most brilliant ever achieved. It requires only that we bring to it a sympathetic and sharp-pointed needle.

Did his death leave his record incomplete?

One would like to know what more he had in his mind to record of these people. Especially is one curious as to the future of M. de Charlus. What did he do in the Great War? Did he open one of his houses as a hospital for not too badly wounded soldiers? Or was he content with lending his name to charity bazaars? Or was he—likeliest of all—galvanised by his high breeding and undoubted courage into a vigour beyond his years, to make a hero’s end? Perhaps we shall never know. Does it much matter? We can finish off these people to our own liking, or—if indeed his book was unfinished—leave them as he left them. There they are for us, all alive—and likely to remain so.

REGINALD TURNER.

X

_A FOOT-NOTE_

Though in England almost every one, who has read and understood, admires the works of Marcel Proust, it is not so in France. There, not to go beyond my own experience, I have met plenty of writers, and good ones too, who cannot away with them. Even that essay on the style of Flaubert, which I had supposed would be universally reckoned a masterpiece, I have heard described by a friend of mine, a charming poet and admired dramatist, as childish. Now, when I hear such a one, and others whom I respect, disparaging Proust, I do not fly into a passion; I seek the cause, instead. And I find it—though the discovery, should they ever come to hear of it, would a good deal shock some of my French friends and surprise perhaps a few of my English—in Politics.